Pointing to historic vote totals in Tuesday’s elections and promising “every single ballot will be counted,” Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson provided an update this morning on the status of the Michigan election returns using a range for results to be finalized of anywhere from later today to Friday. She offered hope for the shorter term saying, “We’ll know much more in the hours to come, and we’ll have a much more complete picture of Michigan by the end of today.”
Benson says that Michigan’s 1,600 clerks have been working through the night to get the tallies logged, but also notes “there are still 10’s of thousands of votes to be counted” in the state of Michigan.
Benson says that more than 5-million voters cast ballots in Tuesday’s Presidential Election and more than 3.2-million of them voted by use of absentee ballots, resulting in a long and tedious process to get those votes tabulated. She notes that 10’s of thousands of votes need to still be counted “in major cities like Detroit, Grand Rapids, Flint, Kalamazoo, and others” around the state and adds, “I hope to have answers within the next 24 hours,” but cautioned that further actions by boards of canvassers could take into Friday for a final count.
Benson reports that “bipartisan groups are effectively, methodically, and carefully” going through the absentee ballots to “count them accurately and fairly,” adding, “My goal is to insure transparency but also to assure that every single ballot will be counted in Michigan.”
“Additional secure protocols” could extend the length of time necessary to get the count done in Michigan according to Benson, who also used today’s press conference to complain again that the Michigan Legislature failed to provide the tools that she and election clerks across the state could have used to get a head start on counting absentee ballots as some other states provided, and asked candidates still trying to determine the outcome to “respect the work of the officials” to get the Herculean task complete.
The previous record turnout in Michigan for a Presidential Election was set in 2008.
